Why Twitter's IPO is still a bargain

Sure there's nothing at all wrong with composing 140 character "micro blog" posts to share with your friends and followers, and the market today gave it's IPO verdict: "That's pretty dang cool."

Embedded in the market valuation is the considered realization that Twitter provides connective tissue to the social network, best-epitomized by Facebook and numerous lesser rivals.  With tweeting to connect Facebook posts and status updates widely to busy friends and followers, Twitter likewise provides critical infrastructure to mobile photo and video sharing utilities like Instagram, Pinterest and Vine, just to name a few.  Twitter's potential will likely just increase as more mobile apps and social utilities develop and proliferate, most piggy-backing on Twitter networks for broadcast and re-tweet to wider networks of like-minded followers, perhaps adding thousands of hash-tagged ad-hock audiences each month eager for fresh content no matter how silly it may be.

When Twitter first appeared in my life in 2009, it reminded me immediately of an early global microsatellite application called Orbcomm, which was birthed in the early 1990s by commercial space pioneer Orbital Sciences Corporation.  Orbcomm introduced me to the amazing capacity of short message "packets" to convey commercially-valuable information in short bursts of fewer than 160 characters.  Using the Orbcomm global network, trucks could relay their GPS location and condition of the cargo they were carrying in microbursts of numeric information via satellite without hogging radio spectrum or expensive bandwidth.

Fast forward ten years to the explosion in cell phone SMS (Short Message Service) texting, which, it turned out, came built-in with every cell phone in existence because every phone call it transmitted required a short data instruction to direct it across the network.  Once carriers discovered it could sell text messages to customers at zero additional cost to them, it did not foresee that texting would replace trillions of voice phone calls with short text messages.  Text messaging taught generations of traditional phone users that talk isn't always cheap, less is more, and short is sweet.

Sometime later, in 2006, the Twitterverse threw open its doors, and through them flew throngs of 140 character thoughts that attracted people to follow them.  The rest is history, they could say after today's 77% bump above the New York Stock Exchange's "TWTR" open.  But I say it's barely the beginning.

The difference between SMS and Twitter is simply that instead of sending a text message from one person to another, you broadcast (or narrowcast) the message to groups of people called "followers."  Now imagine what is possible when networks of tweeters and followers not teenagers or news hounds, but machines and devices that can communicate data compute autonomously with each other.  Twitter is the infrastructure for all forms of transparent data exchanges and transparent real-time massively distributed computation that could lead the way to brain-like function on a global scale.

The best thing is I don't even know what it is I am talking about yet in terms of practical uses that the Twitter infrastructure could enable, but these could include instantaneous "sensory" feedback networks that exceed supercomputer-scale data processing.  The simplest precursor example might be what humans' tweeting does to create "flash mobs," where hundreds of people show up in one place at one time.  What if certain tweets could summon millions of coded status messages from millions of nodes around the world, or by "re-tweeting" the most important or nearest information to form clouds and clusters of activity that can be seen on a map?

The big caveat on my predictions of autonomous tweeting applications is they do not fall neatly into the current Twitter business model which is to generate profits by pushing advertising into Twitter user's phones.  Today's IPO was largely based on predictions of a vastly growing number of users who can be fed short, clever, and non-intrusive advertisements that are tailored to the user's transparent preferences and interests.  If machines follow other machines on the Twitter network as I've suggested, advertisers would well wonder, "what's in it for me."  Humans buy things.  Machines don't.

At least that's how it is-- for now.